Five Meals: A blog about making five meals from one chicken—or at least food on a budget.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

No More Hot Dogs

Last month I was playing in a bonspeil and our team won a mystery box. When I asked another player what they thought was in the box I was told "a bag of dicks." Not having much of an idea what that was I promised him that if he was right he'd get the first mushroom stamp with the first fresh dick.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. With a bag of free hot dogs—used. Yeah, you know it is time to go down to social services and reapply for SNAP benefits when someone offers you a bunch of used hot dogs and you take them. The good news is that they also had extra buns. Or rolls. I think that is some sort of eastern thing…like Maine or something.

Which brings us to cooking them. Or re-cooking. Or, really, re-re-cooking. Usually I'd boil hot dogs in a shallow pan, but that doesn't seem like a good idea since they've been split. The microwave is for lazy people, which sounds like me, but doesn't do much for the texture. So that leaves me with the broiler (too much wasted heat for one hot dog) or throwing the flippity floppity in a pan. And that really is the best way to get some browning going.

A Hot Dog Sandwich?

There are a lot of questions and cultural implications about hot dogs, but for now I'll only dream of a day with none.